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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23620615">places we have never known</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/mistrali/pseuds/mistrali'>mistrali</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Animorphs</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Gen</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-04-12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-04-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-02 17:22:05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,337</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23620615</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/mistrali/pseuds/mistrali</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>In the Yeerk Pool, Rethik 489 waits for a host.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>9</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Chapter 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Rethik 489 is my OC for an Animorphs roleplay over on /r/Animorphs. So this fic is likely to get somewhat AU.</p><p>If they die early on, I’ll just keep writing them.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“We are homesick most for the places we have never known.”</p><p>- Carson McCullers</p>
<hr/><p>Back to floating around in the Earth Pool. How many days has it been? I don’t know. Every three days a fresh batch of Yeerks comes in to feed, but it’s so staggered that no one has a clue what’s going on.</p><p>We’re supposed to be preparing for the invasion by rehearsing battle strategies and learning about humans, as if that’ll make the time in this dapsen dryhole go any faster. As if there is any official battle strategy besides, ‘Hack and slash with your blades, shoot a couple of dracon beams and infest everyone you can.’</p><p>What a joke.</p><p>So we tell stories, play games, make mindscapes and exchange information.</p><p>Yeah, guilty as charged, but what are you gonna do? It’s what everyone here does. Some Yeerks tell stories about their hosts, but Ret Bahri was your stock-standard shock troop Hork-Bajir. Some Yeerks palp-share their memories of the surface, but like I said, mine was all battles. Nothing new. Mostly it’s the Yeerks with human or even Taxxon hosts that have more interesting things to share.</p><p>My favorites are the stories about the homeworld.</p><p>The older Yeerks, the ones who are old enough to remember the homeworld and have already been in and out of multiple hosts, can be coaxed into a story now and again. They talk about how rich and mineral the Kandrona made the air: the real Kandrona, red-hot and blazing, not this weak substitute we have on the ship.</p><p>The nutrient salts of the pools were dense enough to sink into, and full of silt that would build up into hills or coagulate into sludge from the Pool runoff. When the Kandrona-rich electrical storms came, they’d split the hillocks wide apart, creating even more sediment and sludge, which would sink down and… well, you get the idea.</p><p>Just because I’ve spent most of my life here on Earth doesn’t make me less Yeerkish. And no matter what the sub-vissers say, I refuse to lose my only connection to the homeworld, even if it’s only third-palp.</p><p>I know, I know, it’s stupid to believe we might go back to where we were. Yeerks advance: we don’t look back. We don’t get nostalgic. Or so I’ve been told, anyway. </p><p>

I guess I never got that particular echolog.</p><p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Chapter 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The human went briefly limp as I entered the ear canal and coiled myself into the nooks and crannies of the brain.</p><p>Quickly, I took inventory. The systems were in overdrive, as expected. Impulses poured out of the brain, agitating the stomach acids. The adrenal gland was flooding the body with adrenaline. The amygdala was alive with electricity. The heart rate spiked, the lungs contracted, the throat closed up…</p><p>Frustrated, I tried to slow it down. But the flood of chemicals from this brain was confusing. The mind was infinitely more responsive than Ret Bahri’s. The faintest twitch caused a chain reaction of electric impulses in the brain, and released a torrent of chemical into the creature’s bloodstream.</p><p>A barrage of mental static. Meaningless host noise. Then it resolved itself into words: a babble of phrases like lightning flashes: &lt;God, no, not again, I can’t be infested again, this can’t be happening...&gt;</p><p>I tuned it out. Focus. Focus. I breathed like we’d been taught in the training - one breath in, one breath out, past the mucus running down my nose.</p><p>“Name and Pool?” barked a male voice from somewhere above me.</p><p>I blinked. I was in one of the interrogation rooms, kneeling in a cage. There was a reddish-brown substance under my fingernails. A Hork-Bajir female was holding my right arm in an iron grip. I nearly greeted her in Galard before I remembered where I was, and who I was with. A human male was sitting directly opposite me.</p><p>“Name and Pool! Now!” he snapped.</p><p>I looked up and wiped my streaming eyes with numb fingers, tried to shutter my face back into order and make my jaw and tongue work. My stomach was still churning; I prayed I wouldn’t disgrace myself by ejecting its contents all over the pristine floor.</p><p>“Rethik 489, of the Delf Yami Pool.”</p><p>He nodded at the Hork-Bajir, who let me go so abruptly that I pitched sideways and crashed into the bars.</p><p>“Rethik 489, I’m Sub-Visser 129.” He smirked. Sheer rage sent my heart up again; the blood thundered in my veins. I forced myself to look at him.</p><p>“This host absconded for three days and has just been recaptured,” said Sub-Visser 129, smiling all over his smug face. “Her family’s being infested as we speak. The orders are for you to keep them in line and recruit her friends. Can you manage that?” It was a sneer. “Or will we find three valuable host bodies sliced open on the floor with blades through their hearts?”</p><p>You arrogant dapsen gulferch, I thought. I bet you gloated like hell when you heard. Did you record the echolog, too?</p><p>Aloud I said, “No, Sub-Visser.”</p><p>Somewhere inside her own head, the host started to scream.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Chapter 3</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Context: Reth’s at the Yeerk Pool playing cards when Visser 3 walks in. They then watch an Andalite ship, pursued by Bug fighters, crash-land on Earth.</p><p>Edited August 2020.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>I’ll give them this: humans have some engaging pastimes.</p><p>I didn’t care for the food as much as the other Yeerks seemed to - some of them had been eating copiously since we sat down. I fed mine just enough to stop her from getting hungry. But the game, poker, was harmless amusement, which I badly needed after spending so much time in the Pool. I eyed my cards: four red... no, four <em>hearts</em> (stupid name for it, if you ask me), three of them sequential. I was preparing to pick up another when there was a fusillade of Galard from the guards.</p><p>Then I sensed, more than saw, the pale, light-haired figure striding into the Pool, clasping her golden gun. It was Visser Three.</p><p>Something big was definitely happening. Like an idiot, I thought I’d lucked out, getting a host in time for… whatever this was, this landing. Getting a human host, no less, even if she was recalcitrant.</p><p>But sitting there in the semi-darkness of the Pool, cards slipping out of my hands, feeling the chill rolling off the Visser, I realised I was being punished; I was leashed, on probation, three strikes and you’re out. I hadn’t been demoted for allowing Ret Bahri and his family to die, but I might as well have been.</p><p>So I knew better than to so much as sneeze, that night, without my orders. I watched the ship plummet to Earth, burning through the atmosphere, and stood, every sense alert, waiting for the command.</p><p>“The Andalites will be unprepared. We must spread out and attack,” said the Visser. I tensed, feeling the spike of adrenalin; though it was a warm night, my teeth were chattering and I was freezing. At least this host could do nothing when my control slipped, in the brief instant I let the body’s instincts take over. A Hork-Bajir might have brought his arm-blades up to slit his own throat; this host could barely hold a Dracon beam.</p><p>I didn’t know how to fight in this body. For the first time, I realised how vulnerable these humans were: soft-shelled creatures, with none of the Hork-Bajir’s armor or the Leeran’s telepathy.</p><p>But they were numerous; they procreated much more swiftly than our kind. And we would take their long-burning sun, their plentiful waters and their oxygen-rich plants for ourselves. We’d take their chaotic diversity, their ingrained tribalism, all those warring factions we’d learnt about in our xenohistory training module, and… well, integrate them, make them work as a unit.</p><p>There was power in numbers - I might not be able to take one Andalite alone, but if we surrounded him, I and a group of humans with guns and Dracon beams would be a good match for all except the most trained warrior. And so I clustered closer to the other humans, pulled the scarf tighter around my head, as though for protection, and waited.</p>
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